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Prizmo provides optical character recognition on the iPhone

by Mike Schramm Jul 29th 2010 at 9:00AM


Prizmo is a popular OCR (optical character recognition) app for the Mac that allows you to scan documents and things like business cards easily and quickly, avoiding the step of typing them in by hand. Now, Creaceed has announced that it's bringing the app to the iPhone, so you'll be able to make use of the really powerful OCR software, all on the go using the iPhone's HD camera as a scanner.

As you can see above, it's pretty impressive. It's not just the fact that you can scan for text (I believe there are a few apps, including Evernote, that already allow you to do this), but all of the options that come along with it, including adjusting for brightness and calibrating the scanner.

Anything you scan gets included in a Spotlight search, and you can also share whatever you put in right off to Dropbox or similar Cloud apps. Very cool. Creaceed hasn't set a date or price for the app officially yet, so look for it soon on the App Store.

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Prizmo is a popular OCR (optical character recognition) app for the Mac that allows you to scan documents and things like business cards...
 

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elliotjlamb

Uhh.... neat, but isn't it quicker to just type all that information in the first place???

July 30 2010 at 7:18 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
CEBEP

ABBYY BCR does this job one-click, 99% without mistakes. It does not upload to dropbox but I can live with that. It also supports alot of languages and marked languages are recognized automatically. No need to do anything extra on business card image.

And again, it's one click.

July 30 2010 at 4:37 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
gsuhuey

I'm assuming the naysayers haven't ever converted a number of business cards to vcards. The functionality of this app is amazing, and the fact that it splits up the data into separate fields is equally amazing!

You must also understand that they were going at that speed for demo purposes, I'm sure someone who knows how to use the app could beat the pants off of anybody manually entering the text all day long.

I personally can't wait for this app!

July 29 2010 at 2:25 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to gsuhuey's comment
Raphael Sebbe

Yep, exactly. Most image processing operations (crop/white point...) are in the movie for illustration purpose and are not needed to obtain good results. You could to the vcard in under 15 secs I guess.

But it's just so much more than that... We'll try to get some other movies to show it off!

July 29 2010 at 4:18 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
AC88

If they added receipt recognition fields and spreadsheet functionality to do expense reports, then they'd have something.

July 29 2010 at 12:28 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Kurt

In the time it took them to scan that business card I would have been able to type it in directly, without error. How exactly is this an improvement?

Why should I have to adjust white balances and crop? Edge detection algorithms were so last-decade - is manual adjustment the new hotness?

July 29 2010 at 11:14 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
tuaw

It looks pretty neat, but I sure hope the real-world workflow is a LOT quicker than that... Plus, I didn't see an option to add the contact info to your address book. Whaaa???

July 29 2010 at 10:53 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
2 replies to tuaw's comment
sandrine

It's the second button on the Export view.

July 29 2010 at 11:06 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
MattH

II'm thinking the same thing - seems like the workflow is the same or longer to "scan" the data accurately and entering it in manually. Not seeing an improvement here.

July 29 2010 at 1:44 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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